only on c-span3. , nephew oft turing world war ii british codebreaker alan turing, talks about his book, "x, y & z: the real story of how enigma was broken." he chronicles how french, british, and polish spies and mathematicians were able to decipher the german enigma code during world war ii. the international spy museum in washington, d.c., hosted this event. >> good evening, everyone. welcome to the international spy museum. i am chris costa, executive director. i'm very excited to introduce the program with author dermot turing about his new book, "x, y & z: the real story of how enigma was broken." he is also the author of a number of other books. he is the nephew of the famous

cryptanalyst alan turing. prior to his writing career, he worked for the government legal service and then the international law firm clifford chance. he is currently a trustee of the trust. trust --turing he is also a visiting fellow at oxford. last but not least, he is a member of the honorary board here at the international spy museum. and he is a tremendous supporter of our educational efforts at spy. we are excited to have government here today to discuss how enigma was -- we are excited to have him here today to discuss how enigma was broken with the cooperative efforts of poland, britain, and france. after the presentation, we invite you to walk up to the microphones on each side of the theater and ask questions. there will be plenty of time to ask your questions and get them answered. please join me in giving a warm

welcome to dermot turing. thank you. [applause] dermot: many thanks for the warm welcome. i think it is amazing to see how sincepace has transformed the move last year from your previous premises. you have an amazing array of things going on here. it is a very exciting museum to be associated with. it is a privilege for me to be here today and be associated with you more generally. now, you are wondering what the real story of enigma code breaking is because otherwise you would not have shown up to this talk. but i think you probably know it already because you have seen the movie and you know benedict

gentleman onthe the right, played my uncle who is the gentleman on the left. did i get that right? these characters get confused. anyway, never mind. we all know the truth, or at least we think we know the truth, about enigma code breaking. but it is actually a little more involved than what you may have come away from the movie with. i'm not going to give you a cane synopsis because you look it up if you have not already seen it. here is a memo in the british national archives. 1938, the year before war broke out in europe. and it is written by one of the

at whatryptanalysts shortly thereafter became bletchley park who subsequently worked for the nsa here. this is what happens to old spies. they don't actually retire. when he retired from the u.k. school that was later gshq, he worked here for about 20 years. this is what he wrote in 1938. that is benedict cumberbatch on the right. that is the enigma machine. 1931, we weres in provided by the french with photographs and directions to

use the german army enigma cipher machine. a pictureraph shows not available to the public. the enigma machine was commercially available but not in the form the german army was using. this is the thing he is asking this plug board arrangement on the front which was not available on the commercial machine. the directions do not fully explain the function which is still not understood yet. this is 1938. the british did not understand basically how this german army enigma machine works. he says, kenneth french be asked to give us -- can the french be asked to give us all the information they have? quite interesting. this is right before the outbreak of war.

the state of ignorance, if you like, goes on until the outbreak of 1939.rough july the british still do not know the answers to these questions. if they don't know how the enigma machine works, this raises a question for me. the question is this. contrary to what you may have come away from the movie understanding is that alan machine design for the that would find the daily settings for the enigma machine, that design was ready and in the hands of the engineers by no later than november of 1939. have nojuly when they understanding of how the enigma machine works and november when to design a code

breaking machine, something almost miraculous has happened. knowledge has been transformed in that time. a puzzle. what i'm going to talk about for the next few minutes is what is the answer to that particular mystery. i'm going to introduce you to some of my friends. first of all, i'm going to introduce you to this group of friends. here we go. we have got some photographs taken in 1931. i will talk about how those photographs came to be taken in a moment. you can see there is a photograph of an enigma machine. it is not a very good picture but that is clearly what it is. we have a document on the left, berlin 1930. you can see the number of

documents has been redacted in the top right-hand corner. interesting. the reason for that being that we don't want anybody to know whose copy it is that we got hold of. interesting. the plot thickens. and this is the operating instructions for the enigma machine. the document in the middle is what you see on the inside front cover of this which tells you that under the law of june 3, 1914, if you give this away to the enemy, you will go straight to jail. you will not be able to pass go and you will not be in to collect $200. ok. so, these are the famous documents tillman was talking about that were handed over by 1930'snch in the early and the ones that do not explain the operation of this fiendish

plug board device at the front of the machine. how did the brits get hold of these documents? this is where i get to introduce you to some real friends of mine. every one of whom is a spy. beginning on the left, this is my friend. his brother was the head of the army's cipher office. at the end of world war i, he was not doing very well and he begged his brother to give him a job. his brother gave him a job in the cipher office. had access toans the say for certain documents when certainsafe documents were kept.

unfortunately, the salary of a german civil servant between the wars was not particularly great. we all know what happened to the german economy between the wars, so hans was thinking of ways to supplement his income. i will explain in a moment why he needed to supplement his income. this is about the time he joined something called the nationalistic socialistic german workers party. in other words, the not faze -- nazis. that is the photo of him on his nazi membership card. afteras the mid-1930's hitler came to power. we are still stuck in the 1930-31 period. hitler is still trying to get himself elected. he needs the money. he has got the documents. what does he do? he goes to the obvious person likely to be able to buy them from him which is the french

embassy. he walks up the street in berlin to the french embassy and asks to speak to military action shea and says i have some documents that might be of interest to you. and says i attache have some documents that might be of interest to you. berlin believes it is the capital city of spying. not surprising to discover the french between the wars had a process for walk in spies. they would refer the walk-in to the gentleman in the middle. he is very charming looking, isn't he? i tell you, he is very charming indeed because his career was as a professional card shark. he started his career in about the 1870's and he had been

banned for most casinos across europe and went to jail a few times. and he had managed to amass a tidy fortune by fleecing, typically he would charm some young man and win lots and lots of money off of them at cards. he has very many names. most of the time when he was gambling, he was going by the name of the barren from kearney -- baron from kearney. when he was born, he acquired french citizenship. he spoke about 11 languages. botherman and french completely. ,y the time he is meeting hans he has a french name.

rex, that was his spy cover name. and it is a lot easier than the other things. we will call him rex. rex, having retired from gambling, was fired by the german -- sorry, by the french intelligence service. this is kind of a natural career progression, isn't it? the french intelligence service rex, and his job is to spy with thein same kind of steely gaze with which he would fix his victims in the casino. he would suss out these guys. he is the ideal guide to check out hans because he is a native german speaker. meeting setans to a

up in the proper approved fashion. first of all, there is a letter that goes to hans inviting him to come to a particular address where there will be a letter waiting for him that will tell him where to go for the meeting. all of the other meetings after that are set up with unsigned, anonymous postcards which have coded information about where he can go find out information about where documents are to be dropped and that kind of stuff. it is fantastic. he did not make it up. he just looked at the handbook. eventually, we get to the stage where rex has met schmidt and checked him out. yes, he has got some documents. rex is not the expert on whether documents are the real thing or not. from thels in help

cipher experts. and that would be captain burt ertrand on the right, the head of french military intelligence. section d consists of captain bertrand. but that is fine because his job is to buy and sell foreign codebooks because the french cipher bureau, the decoding guys , have all retired. they were really good in world war i, but they reached retirement age. unfortunately when you retire from being a cryptanalyst, you cannot go into gambling. they were just no longer around. ertrand was not a

cryptanalyst. the only way to read them was to buy things from people like hans schmidt. we have to set up a meeting so bertrand can look at the stuff a safe has lifted from and see if it is the real deal. they meet in a hotel in a small town in belgium. this is where it gets fun because >> and schmidt go into the bar, listen to the music, and drinks champagne, and brandy, and smoke cigars. bertrand realizes he has got the real deal. he has the enigma machine operating instructions. he takes his photographer and camera up to the bathroom on the first floor, sorry, on the second floor of the hotel, and

they do the photography there. there is always the question of why they were in the bathroom. i think they were using the bathroom because the photographic apparatus was large and clumsy and probably quite noisy. and therefore, they needed to go somewhere where they would not attract a lot of attention. we know they took the photographs in the bathroom. it was these photographs that i showed you before but i found in the french archives two or three years ago, the original ertrandaphs taken by bart of the team in 1934 instructions and the machine itself. enigma is no longer a problem. he goes to his colleagues in the crypt analytic unit and shows

things and says enigma, problem solved. ontraire.au c you have given us operating instructions. we need wiring diagrams. and we need to know what that funny thing not available to the public is and what it does. bertrand is not dismayed. he gives the documents to the , captain tillman, who say it is right kind of you to give us this stuff, but you gave us operating instructions and those are hopeless if we do not know what the wiring is. if you gave us wiring diagrams, things would be a lot better. bertrand still is not dismayed by this because the year before, bertrand has been instructed by

reach out to polish military intelligence because poland and france have a common problem, which is that germany is aggressive and is wedged firmly between those countries. intelligenceh objectives and french intelligence objectives are probably aligned. bertrand has made friends with the head of the polish cipher bureau. so he offers the documents to colonel langer. colonel linger says these are fantastic, these are what we have been waiting for all along. let's give it a go. if we get anywhere, we will let you know. he puts his own team onto it. i'm now going to introduce you to another one of my friends who looks like a mathematician. he is a mathematician.

and really, he is the most unlikely spy. itself in thermed middle of the 20th century into something geeks and nerds can do. there is hope for all of us, even people like me. graduate mathematics from university in poland. he is sent into a small, dark room and given a commercial enigma machine. he is given the documents bertrand photographed in the bathroom, and he is given a bunch of enigma intercepts. radio messages that have been intercepted in morse code and written down. this is one of the things i regard as being one of the top three code breaking achievements of the 20th century. and he is the first of the top three to do this.

problemes to turn the of the wiring of the enigma machine and its coating the road rotors intoing mathematical equations of permutation theory. some of us loved algebra in high school and some of us did not. you remember if you multiply both sides by two, five minutes later, you can divide both sides by two and end up in the same place. now, i want you to imagine trying to do that with an boiled eggs. -- unboiled divide them by two and multiply by two. do you get back where you started? no, you have to call the cleaners urgently.

this is what permutation theory is like. they work like eggs, not algebra. he had been taught permutation theory in his mathematics course and he was able to solve the permutation equations and deduce the wiring in the enigma machine and in its coding rotors. for those of you who are mathematically inclined and speak polish, we have his equations here and perhaps one of you will be kind enough to explain them to me later. by 1933, theat , by hitler comes to power 1933, the poles have managed to reverse engineer the german army's enigma machine and then building their own fake enigma machines. that machine on the right looks

a bit like an enigma machine. if you study it carefully, there are wires at the back. you can see the keyboard is wrong. it is in alphabetical order. tz whatever. qwer there might be some canadians in the audience that understand. an enigma machine. it is a polish fake enigma machine. it is not a fake. it is a reverse engineered analog, if you like, of an enigma machine. that was built in france during london and is now in has been on show at the science museum in london, but it belongs to the institute in london and is one of two or three surviving

fakes. the--polish they are able to solve the problem that the brits were still itemizing over in 1938 and 1939. they know what the wiring is inside the machine. that means they can start on the real problem which is the code breaking problem. it is all very well to know what the wiring is in the machine, but you have got to know how the machine is set up every day in order to decipher enigma messages. million,nly 150 million, million different ways of setting up the machine every day. you're not going to do it by brute force. with that number, it would take all the time left in the universe to get there. you cannot do it that way. you have got to do something clever. so they brought in the rest of the mathematical crypto analytical team.

guys come up with a host of code breaking techniques which will enable them to figure out how this enigma machine has been set up by the germans every day. pioneers ofre the an electromechanical approach to code breaking. in the old days, by which i mean world war i, code breaking was more about getting what the enemy's codes were. if you came across a code group mean the4, 2, it could battleship queen elizabeth. 8, 4, 4, 2 could mean tomorrow morning. you would have to guess. linguists are great at this because they can interpolate to

work out the missing ones they don't know. this is a pencil and paper exercise in the parsley with stick skills. these guys -- and requires linguistics skills. these guys are mathematicians. they are coming up with logic tests to figure out how the cipher might be working. they have invented this machine on the right-hand side of the slide which is called a bombe and this combines a mechanistic approach to go through all the different rotor settings. possible 5376 positions. they are testing each one for unlikely rotor setting -- a likely rotor setting which is halfway to a solution of how the

machine is set up, probably. that is amazing. they developed this machine and are able to read german army, air force, and even maybe enigma messages in real time in 1938. ok, i told you this was going to be about spying. we have done the math now so we can talk about something else. i'm going to take you to switzerland. hans schmidt did not drop out of the picture after he handed over those documents to be photographed and then had to put them back in the safe by monday morning. otherwise, he would have been caught. he develops a thirst for cash. the key promising to tell you about the cash. i keep promising to tell you about the cash. he is having regular meetings and the other officers

of french military intelligence. and he is not just handing over codes and ciphers material because one day in the mid-1930's after hitler had come to power, he set up a meeting in this rather quaint swiss village . you can just about make out from the photograph the reason it is very dark blue on the left-hand side of the photograph is that really is a 1000-meter drop. he is perched on the top of the cliff. it is incredibly picturesque, but don't get too close to the edge. it is a ski resort in the winter and a hiking resort in the summer. perfect tourist industry spot. he sets up a meeting there. french military intelligence guy sit in the

hotel there. it is the usual sort of business with brandy and cigars. apparently, they had a nice band as well. all very civilized, this spying business. with thesens up ill-gotten proceeds of his activities. very nice f.s.a. case -- attache case made out of soft, polished leather. and fashionable and chic quite visibly very expensive. and he says, i have got good news and bad news. says i am no longer quite so closely associated with the cipher bureau. at which, the french guys looked very dejected.

but he said i have been appointed liaison officer for the [indiscernible] they said, the what? you have to imagine you are in nazi germany. this will be tough. hermann goering, who was hitler's favorite guy for a long time, the head of the german air force and so forth, his role in the nazi party was very significant. because it was the nazi spate, there were many spying organizations, many of which were spying on everybody else in germany. office, that is a nothing,e that means the research office was specifically set up to keep an eye on everybody else that need

and i keeping on them in case they were going to conspire against taylor on the nazi party and so forth -- against hitler and the nazi party and so forth. is supposed to keep tabs or find out what is going on, and he is offering this to the have not even heard of the operation. a code breaking operation as well as internal spying, and it is so closely intertwined in the thinking and military decisions that schmidt has got almost perfect knowledge strategic's intentions, and he's able over the years to share this with french intelligence. let me give you some examples. warfarerf where -- development.

this is a new science in the 1930's. he is closely associated with all of the documents and strategic meetings and decisions that have been taken about how to do tank battles, how to use tanks in a modern warfare scenario. he is selling this information to the french. salaryetting an annual every time he delivers this information. as war discloser, he is able to explain precisely when the attack on poland is going to come. he is able to explain exactly when the attack on france is going to come, and he also oflains how the maneuvers was arman army, which was sickle cut designed to cut off the british expeditionary force in the dunkirk area, destroy them in detail before moving on

to take over the rest of france. does that sound like something that might or might not have happened? he tells thems -- all of these details. we have details of tactics and strategy. and we have a reasonably constant flow of codes and material, over 600 documents counted in his memoir. spy to end all spies. you all will have heard of the -- history. what was schmidt doing with this money and how was he concealing it? if you are a badly paid civil service, how can you explain having this swiss nice suit and

the posh briefcase and all of that? not to mention the expensive , wearingwith his wife an expensive dressing down. it was not just the wife, schmidt had other expensive habits. champagne, brandy and cigars. and moree girlfriends, brandy, and then the girlfriends needed brandy and maybe not cigars. they were nannies, and were hired by him on the basis that they might become girlfriends, and then fired by rs.ers schmidt -- misse schmidt. nannies got progressively uglier. [laughter] the french said we

are worried about you and this cash because you are visibly living a lifestyle that is not commensurate with what your earnings are supposed to be. something called a money laundering scheme. had run a field soap factory business in the early 1930's, and so they invited schmidt to revive the soap factory idea, and he could present the earnings from spying as being the prophets of his soap factory. solvent factory became because they literally laundered the fruits of his labors through the soap factory business. he truly is a star of a spy. he is fantastic. ex a lot, but i have

these criminals competing for my affections as to which is the most splendid spy. we are going to have to go back to britain and deal with more normal kind of guys. i'm going to introduce you to some british spies. cigarette is the alastair denniston, head of the government code and cipher school up until 1942 when he was fired. hisman in the middle is number one crypt analyst. -- essentiallyy a professor of ancient greek. what he did as a professor of ancient greek is quite astonishing. reconstruct ato likef dodgy poems, this is fourth century bc porn.

dodgy poems. the problem was the author had written his poems on something that was basically crumbling papyrus. all of the bits of greek were in fragments. was to reassemble these fragments into meaningful porn. , but you sort of great can see this is like a code breaking exercise because you're is partlygether -- it a jigsaw puzzle and partly a linguistic puzzle. and it is all going on in ancient greek, and a slightly odd ancient greek because the author had an unconventional approach to writing verse. why am i introducing these guys to you?

by 1938, britain had woken up to the idea that adolf hitler was not going to be a good thing. they had realized the immediate threat to peace in europe was not the bolsheviks, who they had thought it was, but the nazis. they started communicating with the french about the possibility of something that might look like an alliance. a bit late, but they got there in the end, 1938. lettershy there are starting to be written about asking the french about the enigma machine to see what they know. the french invite the british to in januarye in paris of 1939, to discuss code breaking problems, and particularly the enigma. bertrand, the mover and shaker

behind this, thinks it is a bit suspicious that he handed all of the stuff over to langer in and has not heard a whisper since then about have made anyles progress, so he invites them to the conference as well. the three countries turn up to the conference and paris and earnestly discuss the enigma machine. ruby agrees it is a difficult problem and it is important to solve it -- everybody agrees it is a difficult problem and it is important to solve it as soon as possible. which is deceptive on the part of the poles. when you think about it, who are you going to tell? which allies do you think are real allies and which ones do you think are fickle? to which extent are you really

willing to trust people with the secrets of your own intelligence gathering? is there a problem -- this is a problem not specific to 1939, but all areas. -- all eras. so i don't think it is surprising that they said nothing at this meeting in 1939. you might think therefore the conference was a complete failure, but i don't think it was. two things come out of it. one in particular. this is the memorandum of agreement. -- byin french, by trond bertrand. says for greater convenience and discretion, from now on we will call ourselves by the

following initials. and to please number the documents so we can keep track on them. that is also important because what they are doing is sharing , except for this piece of information that the but nobody knows that they know. traffic, poland has radio masks so they can pick up signals that are not by the british or the french. they are providing information that is valuable. they are also agreeing to cooperate on codes and ciphers programs. enigma is not the only fruit. there are loads of other codes and ciphers. --re is a lot of comfort correspondence going on between the three countries, in german because that is the common

language. i find that amusing. but they are cooperating. from january 1939, and marks the beginning of this special info sharing relationship. the other thing that comes out of the conference is it is agreed that if any of the three countries makes a breakthrough on the enigma problem, they have to tell the others by sending "t a telegram that says something has come up." areuly, the poles confronted with some problems. one is that they cannot break enigma codes anymore. the germans have added additional rotors to the machine so there are now five to choose

from. are now 60 different ways of putting three rotors into an enigma machine, whereas previously there had only been six. have six of their famous machines, but not 60. without 60 of them, they were not able to rapidly enough break the enigma messages and they needed help with technology. that happened by july 1939 is blindingly obvious, that halo was rattling the saber very loud and they were feeling tot they really needed transform their intelligence sharing relationship into something that felt more like a tough military alliance. so polish intelligence was given authority from on high to show the enigma secrets. they sent out a telegram.

bertrand goes to warsaw with his number two. they are told the secret of enigma. told the secret in this building. i like this building because this is still a center of spying. building that was built for a polish bureau and still exist outside warsaw. headquarters of nato air traffic control for eastern europe. so you are not allowed in command were not ever allowed in. you can see it has soldiers guarding it. that thing is a memorial plaque to the polish code breakers. windows --s on the

it is much bigger underground, rdis. like doctor who's ta the grills on the windows have pockmarked from german machine guns when poland was invaded in 1939. quite an interesting building but you cannot go in. with fromcame away this two-day meeting is this list. you can see it is in german. each one of these is an entire chapter of the enigma story. have things like how to reconstruct the cipher wheels in .he enigma the machines, and various other things. one, other

possibilities is another 17. -- is number 17. pausing there, i think i've answered the question i started with, which is how come the british went from zero knowledge -- not quite zero knowledge but close to zero knowledge -- about the enigma sheen in july 1939, to the point where alan turing can design his machine and be discussing how it might work with engineers as soon november 1939? it is because of this. this transfer of know-how. of aansformed the ability british team to get on with the problem. what happened next? i probably don't need to introduce these gentlemen, he is not one of my friends and some

of you would probably say he is not a gentleman. he is taking a salute in the square after the conquest of poland. this was taken about october 1939. the reason it is my favorite world war ii photograph is has no ideaer that in the building behind him, they uncovered the secrets of the enigma machine. breakers did not poland, they were ordered to escape with their precious knowledge and eventually wound up in france working for bertrand, who has been promoted to major. this is interesting.

xyz triangle is reconstituted with the french and polish in this building, and a telegraph link to bletchley park. the three teams are working harmoniously together and breaking enigma. turing is alan working on his design for a bomb. this commemorative stamp always amuses me. the british like doing these commemorative stamp collector stamps. this was done in the early 1990's. they did a series on famous scientists. --t of them had their fame faces on the stamps. apparently that is what alan turing's face looked like. [laughter] the only problem is germany has its eye on invading france.

sooner or later, this arrangement is not going to survive. and polish team have set up in and they the unoccupied part of france. but we have a problem. we have several problems. when germany occupied warsaw in 1939, they took back to berlin as many documents, as many secret documents as they could find. this is normal practice. the reason i am here researching on co-breaking in -- code breaking in america is that the the germanook all of intelligence documents they could find and stuck them in the national archives here, which is helpful.

what the germans did was they analyzed documents they found in warsaw and came across some really quite alarming material that suggested the polls have been reading enigma messages before the outbreak of the war. concocted wanted lists, here's an example of one of them on the left. they have the names of the polish code breakers, and they had mugshots of the polish code breakers, and they were looking for these guys in france. their intelligence was not bad, they had tracked these guys to france. they did not know where they were but they thought they were in france somewhere. they had obviously come across who is looking slightly older and a bit more seedy, but the cigar gives it away. that is my friend rex. probably in the

1940's, i would think. got the baron von kern eurnig on the list as well. becausea problem everybody in german intelligence rex becauseck down they know he holds all the secrets. you may be asking yourselves who the gentleman on the right is. friends. of my he is not. panzer general, rudolph schmidt. he is the guy in the cipher office in the 1920's and 1930's, and gave the big break. 19 43 -- 1943, 1944, he is a

highly regarded german tank officer and he has a problem. rex got a problem because is found. the wanted list has done its work. early 1943.sted in because he is rex, you don't get taken to a dank cell and get his toes stomped on to tell the truth. he gets fed cigars and branding, and that makes him talk. he is installed in a very nice hotel in paris and his interrogation takes about two months. with heavily loaded high-quality food and drink and lots of cigars. and he tells everything. in particular, he tells the

story of schmidt and the safe. schmidt isolph relieved of his command. it?s kind of unfair, isn't what did he do wrong? he gave his brother a job. but anyway. this is a map of the south of france with some red dots on it. this is the fate of these guys. lists are outd and the french -- excuse me, the germans have decided they are invading the unoccupied part of france and the americans have landed in north africa, the world has suddenly turned upside down. the polish code breakers are on the run for the for -- for the third time.

docks are significant places in their story. this one is where rex was holed up in the spanish mountains. i think it is probably just a coincidence that these other places are also close. within 10, 15re minutes drive, and this is maybe an hours drive through the mountains. operations base of for trying to get the polish out of what is now fully occupied france. there are pickups in the mediterranean organized with british submarines. these operations don't work and the polish are realizing that the only way they will get out is to cross the mountains into spain and hope they don't get picked up by the not very neutral spanish.

the base of operations, some of , and equations men and code breaker in particular, they make it to this place, and they have to bribe their guide because this is people trafficking. you know how it works. you pay the fee to be traffic. half of these are supposed to be peopler safe delivery of over the border. time -- bute the then they would lift all of their money off of them and the fee is doubled, a complete disaster. they are abandoned at the top of the mountain and it is the second week of january, 1943. there is a foot and a half of snow on the ground. it is minus heaven knows what.

they are told spain is that way, off you go. they make it across the border, and they get arrested. and spent theted next six months in a spanish jail. cross managed red to get them out and back to the u.k., which was great, so they could carry on doing co-breaking in britain. town that somer of the other polish code breakers, but in particular ,anger, the head of the team there was some sort of bonkers story about them enable to walk from there into spain. it's about 15 kilometers, and through the snow in the middle of the night over the mountains. it was not going to happen. they took a taxi. [laughter] mr. turing: that was what you did.

they got most of the way and there was a roadblock, and it turned out once again, their guide -- it was people trafficking, so their guide was in cahoots with the gestapo. upy got arrested and ended in a german prison camp. what happened to the rest of them in the end? ski, heou about rigid died in a shipwreck in 1942. it is amazing we have a photograph of the ship going down. some people survived but he was not one of them. eisenberg, schloss now in the czech republic, this is the place where langer and his number two were sent after they were arrested. saga, they were interrogated about what it is they had been able to achieve the prewarigma in

period. hisas only by langer and colleagues subtle preparation, the fact the allies had broken the enigma was kept secret. they did it in the most astonishing way. they said of course we broke the enigma, but you changed the system and changed your procedure and locked us out. all of which was completely true. it played straight into the --ds of the germans because the guys and interrogating them where the experts who had recommended the changes in the first place. they felt vindicated so the interrogation ended where it ought to have begun. for keeping langer the secret secret.

re-ascii and zukowski eventually got released from the spanish jail. one of them -- did not return to poland after the war because it was to dangerous. it was a satellite of the soviet union, and these guys, particular after they got back to britain, were put onto decoding russian material. russia was supposed to be an ally, so this was very dangerous. the idea that they could go back to poland knowing what they knew recordsng blank service and enable to escape investigation by the secret

police, it beggars belief. so the most unlikely character to be a spy, he actually did that brave thing and got investigated by the polish secret police. it was only once stalin was dead and the so-called reforms of communism took place in the mid- 1950's that he was effectively free. and able to pursue a normal life. he looks a little like a 1950's film star in this. -- that isme barclays bank behind him. he has kind of a cool guy. he stayed in the u.k. for the rest of his life and had a very nice family life and became a mathematics professor.

you wouldn't have minded being taught math by this guy, he is great. a proficient musician and stuff. for him, it was happily ever after. the real star is look at this french general at the top right. s.ok at all of those medal that is for trond, he is taken on by general de gaulle -- that is bertrand, he is taken on by general de gaulle for the french military intelligence, particularly signals intelligence. he finishes his career in the 1950's. he is only a brigadier general, but that is pretty good for the guy who started off as a captain who was photographing stuff in the bathroom. pretty cool combination of a career.

when he stopped spying, he became the mayor of his village and there is a nice commemorative plaque to him in the village. bertrand probably gets all of the owners here. so there we are, i am done. we promised you the opportunity for questions and i would be happy to invite them. perhaps we can have the house lights up and we can start that process off. [applause] >> we have microphones at either side of the room and if you are trapped, i can also try to get to you with a microphone if you have a question. durmot.nned by you ger

mr. turing: if you want to make a line behind the microphone, i will go left, right. >> can you explain what the commercial use for the machine -- before it was converted it was available to the public, what were they doing with that? mr. turing: industrial secrets mainly, i imagine. codes and ciphers have been used for all kinds of industrial purposes for centuries. in the old days when you had to pay by the number of words and telegrams, people used to use codes to cut down on the number of words they could use. you could find that most companies would have a code book and they would send stuff and code. this doesn't do that, it doesn't

cut down the number of characters you will send, but there was stuff you probably did not want people to know. youine you are a bank and are trying to arrange a letter of credit for international trade. your customers don't want everybody to be able to read how much they are paying for whatever it is, a shipment of something or another. it would be wise to encode that kind of stuff and cipher it. before military uses. the military started getting excited about it as it came onto the market, looking for ways to adapt it and make it for military purposes but it was originally conceived as an office thing. i have two questions. mr. turing: that is all right, you have the floor. workingot the first german enigma machine and did it

play a role in the development of the bomb? or was a purely theoretical from the instruction booklet? in the early months of the war it was purely theoretical from the instruction booklet. the brits were very excited to have one of the polish fakes given to them in 1939, which happened after the warsaw meeting. it was the first time they had gotten their hands on the functional equivalent of an enigma machine. sooner or later it was bound to happen that one got captured in combat. the germans were winning the war for the first few years, so the likelihood of a capture was quite low during that period. there were some ships sunk and

boarded, which enabled the british to get a hold of some naval enigma machines. i think it wasn't until 1941 that they got a complete set of rotors to go with the machine. breakthroughs were mostly dependent on the theoretical analysis, and later in the war when the germans machines, wenigma were relying on information given about the adaptations rather than actual captures of pieces of kit. my other question is, do you think that alan turing read the math paper, or a translation of it? mr. turing: no, that wasn't written until 1967.

is memoirs,d you these are the equations that i constructed. he explains them. , what wasnly in that meeting in warsaw, turing was not present in that meeting, but the explanations given to knox and denniston, were related back to turing in the u.k.. knox in particular was quite skeptical whether the polish breakthrough could have been done by pure mathematical analysis. he felt that the polish had cheated in some way, stolen some information or done something through spying or whatever. turing said no, i can see exactly how he did it, this theory.

course, once you know what the answer is, you've looked at the back of the book and you can see what the answer is, it is a little easier. meet, they did meet in paris in january 1940. how good the conversation was, i don't know, because he didn't speak any english. been beginning to speak some french. enough tog was good order things in a restaurant, but not good enough to talk about code breaking. course, all mathematics graduates in the 1930's, the

lingua franca for mathematics was german. all the really good mathematicians were german. some of them were in french but most in german. -- some of the important papers were in french but most in german. if you wanted to keep up with mathematical thinking, you had to be good enough in german to read a technical paper. i think probably the german language is what was spoken around the table. it is intriguing, though. ok, please. you have been very patient. >> what do you think the german military's reaction was when they found out that the allies had control of a real enigma machine? mr. turing: this is almost like a sort of history in its own right. you have a great question there, how many hours we have?

you don't want dinner. [laughter] mr. turing: the initial reaction, as i explained earlier, when they found out about the polish successes, their own developments have been vindicated. in fact, quite a few historians have been quite snippy about the way the germans reacted to security scares. there were at least a dozen scares during the course of , in ther ii, which opinion of historians, also told the germans that the enigma machine was not secure. or at least not securing the way they were using it. ought to have therefore changed things. we anglo-americans were so much not makeer and did those mistakes. i think that story is slightly biased and slightly unfair.

the germans were constantly investigating the security of enigma. what they did not foresee was that the quality of the code breaking devices that were available to the allies would be so superior to what they had. they were, as were the allies, using punchcard type technology to do code breaking on their side. so were we on our side. we got things like bombs and the colossus machine, which were immeasurably more sophisticated than what they had. then -- so then did they actually know that the enigma had been broken aside from the success of the polish? i think they didn't. they probably should have done but they didn't. many of the senior polish code breakers were in denial about it

until many decades after the war. when the enigma code breaking story broke and the public in the mid-1970's, some of the german code breakers were still alive. they said, this is nonsense, this is fiction, this is spy stuff. the first books written about it were full of rubbish anyway, not very accurate. it was easy for them to say the enigma was perfectly secure and this is rubbish, don't believe these popular books you can find in station bookstores. we we have more detail and know where the truth is. i think it's quite interesting that they were still in denial about it in the 1970's. ok. >> one of the slides you showed was a replica that the polish built with the keyboard.

what are the outcomes of the july 1939 -- one of the outcomes of the july 1939 conference was english andave the the french copies of that machine. another chronicle claims that when the french and polish, in france before it was totally occupied, were cooperating with the british at bletchley park. that the only secure means of communication they had was using those replica enigmas. they further embellished that claim with the fact that the french operator always started his messages with "heil hiller." that means no messages were started with the letter h. i find that improbable. i'm wondering if anything you found could substantiate a claim like that. mr. turing: i believe this to be true.

this comes from burt reynolds -- rand's number two. machines, about the oneav bertrand had this polish fig machine even to him in warsaw -- fake machine given to him in warsaw in 1939. it was crucially important to build more of these fake enigma machines. when the polish team reached him later in 1939, bertrand requisitioned, or put in an order and his favorite manufacturing company in paris for additional enigma machines. quote -- itgot the was very expensive -- for what he was ordering, in april 1940.

that was like three weeks before the germans arrived. omehow, miraculously, bert rand managed to convince the manufacturing company to continue with its work and they managed -- and he managed to pay them even though they were working in the occupied part of france. by the early part of 1942, he of begun to take delivery parts of fake enigma machines made by this factory. them into theng unoccupied zone, bits at a time, where they were reassembled by shadow -- in his chateau in the south of france 1942, thee summer of

polish had created a fully operating ending the machine and could communicate with leslie park using it and bletchley park was very concerned about the security of it, not just the heil hitler thing. a communication, does your machine have a plugboard and how do we know what the key we are using should be? they were figuring this out. 1942, the polish and french in the south of france were communicating using an enigma machine. now, your question about the heil hitler thing, is they thought it was so hilarious they were using a german machine to communicate in a way that was shielded from the germans. he said, to rub it in, we signed .ff our messages heil hitler

one,very single occasionally. i don't think there is any evidence the germans were aware that the brits and franco pol es were trading messages using an enigma. i think it's quite likely they never knew, because it was such a short-lived thing. they managed to get the communications protocols agreed by the end of september 1942. the cooperations in the south of france came to an end in november 1942 when the germans invaded the south of france. there was only a month they were doing this. enoughprobably just long for anything significant to happen. i will come back to you in a minute. was turing's design based on the other? question, thisd

one will take about four hours and i will need a blackboard. [laughter] mr. turing: all right. while they are getting the blackboard, let me give you the quick answer. at the heart of both machines is the idea that you get the machine to do the brute force, cranked through the 17,000 settings of the three rotors, and then stop when it comes up with a plausible setting of the three rotors. the polish were doing a logic test based on the indicator, the first part, the metadata part of methodator park, and the germans had change that. not dependsign did on the preamble process that the

germans had been using before that date. a probableing for word in the body of the message. if you think the message contains the word "weather did, at," and they all nice, long german word, you can test that against your intercepted morse code. qkqwab, and find a place where it turns into that gobbledygook. if there is a rotor setting that consistently transformed those letters and the observed fashion, it would stop. his machine was little more sophisticated and that it was doing what is called a probable word test. but it's also testing for the plugboard settings as well, which the polish machine could not do. that was the really imaginative

bit. that would seriously take me four hours, some not going to do it. look at the bomb replica, you get the full on story. does question was, how alan turing's contribution to ins compare with the spies poland? mr. turing: i would not trust alan turing with the dead letter drop. he never wore hats, and to be a proper spy, you have to wear a hat. [laughter] mr. turing: it's really hard to compare the contributions. -- without this it is difficult to imagine the next stage.

spying the old-fashioned being done by rex and schmidt, and the bathroom photography of bertrand, would the polish have made their breakthrough in the 1930's? it is possible. says he washem significantly helped by having the operating instructions. he said later in his life he thought he probably could have figured it out without the instructions. so maybe it was not as crucial, but we know it was in the change of cause -- chain of causation. would the british have gotten there without the polish contribution? i think they would have done. they were capable of doing a mathematical analysis once they hired the mathematicians, which was in 1938. in 1928,h hired them 10 years ahead of the game.

the british would have gotten there, but later. what would the consequences of that have been, particularly when you think about the operational use being made of enigma intelligence early in the war? contribution was more significant? been ablebrits have to invent a machine of the bombty of the british without alan turing? i think the answer to that again is probably yes. if you look at the other alan turing was not involved in, he did not design the colossus, and if you another bomb machine in the u.s. army bomb machine were doing, completely different designs. they were relying on some of the ideas that have been shown to them by alan turing, but these

are very sophisticated pieces of engineering. i am fairly sure that somebody would have come up with a similar thing, and might have been later in the war. all of these things are, if this hadn't happened, it would've been different. that is clear. whose contribution was more significant? i don't know. but whose contribution was more fun, come on, we are going to the casino right now and smoke some cigars, and we are going to go to the soap factory to pay homage. that stuff is just so good. carre could not have written that. >> you mentioned early on that the polish code breakers had enough information to know when the invasion of poland was going to take place. were they able to use this information in any way?

mr. turing: it's not the polish that got the information, the french got that information from schmidt. the interesting thing about all of that priceless information that schmidt gave, the highest quality human intelligence you could get, it was all obstinately ignored. you have to ask yourself why that was. why, when the french were given the stuff and it was proved time and again to be 100% accurate, why were they not paying more attention? there is this problem with human intelligence. you say your spy is really good, and 100% accurate, and i say spy is really good and 100% accurate, and somebody else says there spy is 100% accurate, and you have all this conflicting noise. the job of a good intelligence department is to sift through

that and work out the consensus. all of these spies are doing it for dodgy reasons that don't stack up morley. is verytelligence difficult to rely on. i think the french can be forgiven for ignoring schmidt. he was just one of a number of people, and it is only hindsight that has proven he is right -- was right. difficult and possibly more interesting question, why the french did not make more serious operational use of the enigma intelligence rand was giving them during the battle of france. cryingd is almost through his memoirs, and langer working with him at the same time, expressing exactly the same emotions. luftwaffe attack on paris

during the battle of france was immense detail through enigma decrypts given to french military planners. they knew how many german aircraft, exactly what direction they will be coming from, what time the attack was coming. it was perfectly possible for the french air force to intervene, and they did not. they just let the luftwaffe come. it wasn't because they did not have aircraft to retaliate with. why didn't they do it? i don't know the answer. bertrand said it was like feeding sweeties to the swine. we gave them this priceless information. know how to did not use signals intelligence and we

have the same problem and britain with the british royal navy. the admiralty did not know how to use signals intelligence. they were being told things and it was just another piece of intelligence and we will treated like all of the other stuff. they did not realize you could treat it as being on a higher plane than human intelligence. i think that is what went wrong. but those generals are not here to answer for their conduct. most of them disappeared into obscurity after the fall of france and i don't think they were regarded as national heroes and nobody wanted to speak to them. so we don't know. could you possibly explain in when theil how and polish contributions became known to the general public, and the polish -- and his

interactions? mr. turing: it's easy to answer your question in a negative sense. historian wholish polishting about military intelligence between the wars period. he was researching, this was in the 1960's. he was researching in the polish military archives in warsaw and came across a paper written by a mathematician. this was quite interesting that thee claimed germans had been using a machine called enigma for insight hering theirncip

secret stuff, and this guy was saying i was part of the team that broke them. tracked the guy down and calls on him to write up his story and more detail, which is why we have this account, the memoirs written in the late 1960's and early 1970's. that poland was still a communist country than , and theretry then was something called iron curtain, and not many people could understand polish. so the fact that there was this book published in poland and polish meant that it was still a well-kept secret as far as we were concerned. but gradually the story leaked out.

memoirs inote his the early 1970's because he was very keen that some misinformation that had gotten out there, probably by somebody who had gotten hold of the other book. he was trying to set the record straight. in an obscure language called one or two alarmed brits got a hold of it. there was an official, semi-sanctioned book written by a guy who probably knew some of , frederick,ng on who had a significant role in exploiting intelligence during the war. a book called the ultrasecret and it sold more books than the enigma code breaking ever. story -- i am

sorry, i think i probably have not answered your question. i am talking about all i know that pertains to what you asked. [laughter] >> the books were translated to several languages. mr. turing: the more recent books. he wrote a book that was much more detailed. it is called enigma in english. i do not know what it is called in polish. the german and english versions are very different. polish is probably different again. [laughter] >> but these kind of accounts, [indiscernible] mr. turing: that is part of the

mismanagement of the story. for those of you, let me explain. the poles had been angry for many years because the first stories that came out of the enigma code breaking in the west, there was no credit to the polls for their -- for the achievement.eir there is a reason they are not giving -- given credit. it was not a conspiracy against poland. it is simply that the people who were involved personally in the early stages of the egg, story -- the enigma story were not intelligence was written in the 1970's and 1980's.

let's go through the list of people we know about. was sacked in 1942 and died in the early 1950's. knox died in 1943. moved out of ashley park into 1943 and moved on to other products -- other projects and we all know what happened to him after the war. guys whoe the three had personal contact with the polish code breakers. john jeffries died in 1942 as well. who were the ones personally knew what the public had done. -- what the polish had died. -- had done. around interviewed by the official historian only had

a hearsay knowledge about what the polish had done. namesitish gave british to the polish. method was the clock rechristened because the paper sheets they were used were made in a town called banbury. this sheets were renamed. meant everything the polish had done was lost the memory. this is a struggle for them to understand because they assume we are lovely in the west, but we keep our secrets.

i've been in the national art today and i wanted to look at put inn enigma that were the archives in 2010. i was not permitted to look at them. iny are still classified 2020. that is how excessive we are about the enigma secret, 75 years after the war ended. this was a secret. people were not allowed to know. while he was free to write books in communist poland, he was not allowed to write books on the subject in the west. so these half-truths and mistaken accounts were all that was available and it took until midway through the 1980's when put a counter blast to the official history about what

had happened to [indiscernible] that the record was able to be corrected. so the perception is the brits were trying to whitewash the polish out of history, and it is not true but we understand why you think that way. can we let someone else have ago? schmidtver happened to who delivered the goods, and his brother? mr. turing: i told you about his brother because that was slightly less dramatic. there was a reason why rudolph schmidt was relieved of his command when his brother was arrested. know exactly what nevered but we know he made it out of jail and his body in found in his cell

september, 1943. there is enough circumstantial evidence to indicate he probably took his own life. for someone ending country he betrayed his so some people say just desserts but i am disappointed because he never got to write his memoirs. i think rudolph, i feel very sorry, why did he get relieved of his command just because his brother betrayed his country? >> thank you.

>> you will be signing your book out in the hallway. mr. turing: it would be a pleasure. >> thank you. [applause] >> american history tv is on social media. follow us at c-span history. q&a, peggy wallace george, daughter of wallace, talks about her father's controversial career and what inspired her to write her book, the broken road. >> back in 1996, we took our youngest son who was nine at the time to the martin luther king

museum historical site in atlanta. and towent to his church his grave, and we went over to the museum, newly constructed at that time. and we were going to the exhibits and we came to the alabama exhibit. it showed the bombed out baptist dogs, andre hoses and george wallace standing in the schoolhouse door. and my son looked at me and he , why didwas so sad popeye do these things to other do these things to other people? it broke my heart. and i said, he never told me why he did those things to other

people, but i know he was wrong. so maybe it will just have to be up to you and me to help make things right. announcer: watch tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span's q&a. next, holly brower discusses the lives of children during the , including their legal status and treatment by the justice system. conducted atw was the annual historical association meeting. >> holly brower is a professed number of history at the university of maryland and an children a book about in colonial america. thank you for being here with us. let me begin with a broad question and you can take it in any direction. how were children